SOL excuses, Tajh Boyd's audible

A weekly roundup of short opinions offered by the Daily Press Editorial Board

August 29, 2013

Educational excuses

At some point, surely, Virginia's school officials are going to run out of excuses when SOL scores plummet. Their excuses — the tests are harder, the format has changed, they've moved from pencil and paper to online — are just as unacceptable as the students' old stand-by, "The dog ate my homework." And they sound just as flip.

This year's results, released by the Virginia Department of Education last week, showed a drop in the average pass rate on English across the state. Locally, that translated to most Peninsula schools seeing a "double-digit decrease in the average pass rate on English exams," according to a Daily Press story. Fourth-grade reading and fifth-grade writing scores took the biggest hits. The news was mitigated somewhat, both locally and statewide, by a marginal increase in the math pass rate. (That, in turn, had dropped the year prior after a test change.)

Worse yet, local school officials were reported as saying they anticipated lower scores because of the changes in the reading, writing and science tests. The pattern has been that any time there's a change in the Standards of Learning tests, which Virginia first adopted in 1998 to establish minimum competency in core subjects, scores have dropped the following year.

This tells more about teaching to the test — one for minimum competency that just 70 percent of students must pass for a school to retain accreditation — than anything else. If students were learning how to conduct their studies online, if they were involved in the "multiple steps and use of critical thinking skills" newly required by the latest tests, as surely they should be, then no appropriate test would elicit such a dramatic drop in competence.

The state superintendent of public instruction's attempt to whitewash the results by basically re-setting the achievement line at this year's miserable performance — "The results of the new English and science tests begin new trend lines" —shouldn't be tolerated. Every student needs to be able to master basic writing and reading skills if they are going to have a fair shot at success as an adult in the workplace. Both local employers and an increasingly competitive global marketplace require that our students have better-than-basic skills.

School officials need to raise their expectations, stop making excuses, and work harder to impart the necessary skills.

A passing grade

College football season has arrived, and with that in mind we'd like to call your attention to Tajh Boyd, the senior quarterback at Clemson who is a graduate of Phoebus High School in Hampton.

He is the latest in a long series of outstanding college quarterbacks who have come from the Peninsula in the past decade or so, and the preview publications are listing him as one of the frontrunners for the Heisman Trophy.

Mr. Boyd had the chance to leave school early and enter the NFL Draft last spring but chose to return for his senior year. He is on schedule to graduate with a degree in sociology. Many college athletes who have dreams of going pro seem to take for granted the value of a free college education. We're glad to see Mr. Boyd finish what he started.

Roses and thorns

Each week, the Daily Press Editorial Board offers a list of area citizens or institutions deserving of "roses" or "thorns."

This week's roses go to:

• All of our local students and teachers who are preparing to start a new school year next week.

• The folks at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on the Eastern Shore, who are preparing for the facility's first lunar launch. A probe will be sent up on Sept. 6 to study the moon's atmosphere.

• To local residents who have shared their stories this week on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. Thanks for bringing history to life.

This week's thorns go to:

• The Accomack County Board of Supervisors. After one of the supervisors remarked that the board was a big supporter of the public library, the Eastern Shore News determined that only one of the nine board members had a library card.

• Robert Walls of Richmond, awaiting trial in York County on multiple counts related to a 2011 drunken driving incident. His indecision on various plea deals has prompted three attorneys and one judge to drop off the case.